Basque Functional Heads

Bill Haddican NYU 6/18/2001 0. Introduction This paper makes three claims about Basque grammar. First, it argues that Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy of functional heads largely holds for Basque. In a typical pattern, lower morphemes in the hierarchy appear in the reverse order, while higher morphemes appear in Cinque’s order. This is explained through roll-up—iterative XP movement through specifier positions—for the lower morphemes but not for the higher ones. Second, it argues for a different view of negative/affirmative word order alternations from that proposed in Laka (1990). Crucially, in affirmative sentences—but not negatives— the rolled-up chunk of lower morphemes fronts. Drawing on Koopman and Szabolcsi’s (2000) analysis of verbal modifier raising in Hungarian, it is claimed that this rolled-up chunk raises to spec, NeutP—a phrase which is only projected in neutral clauses. Finally, this approach to affirmative/negative word order differences is extended to embedded clauses, providing an account of the clause-medial position of complementizers in negative sentences. Part 1 describes the Basque functional heads to be discussed. Part 2 derives the order of these functional heads in terms of Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy. Based on this order, it motivates an analysis of affirmative/negative word order differences in matrix clauses. Part 3 discusses the problem of complementizers and attempts to explain their clause-medial position in negative clauses based on the previous analysis of affirmative/negative word order differences in matrix clauses. Part 4 compares the present analysis with Laka’s Σ-phrase account of the same facts.